A Hard Day's Work in the Mushroom Kingdom

Toadstools are pretty useless, considering they're supposed to be Princess Peach's guards. To be fair, they don't have any kind of weapons or defenses that they can use.

Still, if not for their carelessness, we wouldn't have many Mario games. It'd be nice though if Toad did more than say "Your princess is in another castle." How is it that Toad is always at the end of those castles?

What has he been doing while Mario is out jumping and cleaning pipes? It's some kind of conspiracy, like a deal that he's made with Bowser or something.

Xbox One: A Space Odyssey

If you haven't heard, the Xbox One is always on.

People just have to say, "Xbox, on" and the system turns itself on.

That means that the system has to be listening all the time and the Kinect has to be connected in order for the system to work. It's easy to draw some parallels from other forms of media.

How all this will pan out has yet to be seen. Microsoft's Kinect is no longer just a sensor, soon it will be able to watch and listen to you. That's some creepy stuff.

In the meantime, we'll just make fun of it and wait to see what actually happens.

Strip Search: Cats and Cars Comic

Today's comic is a little bit special.

For the past several weeks I've been watching Strip Search, an online reality show that attempts to find the next great web comic. It's run by the guys over at Penny Arcade.

Well, for every elimination, the creators have the two contestants make a comic with two random themes and they have 90 minutes to do so.

Today's themes were cars and cats. Here is the episode if you'd like to check it out:

New episodes are up every Tuesday and Friday, the same days I update my comics.

Anyways, the above is my at-home challenge piece. I used vector masks for this particular comic; it's a new technique that I just learned about.

Xbox One: Reaction

Microsoft finally unveiled their new Xbox One early on Tuesday.

If you want to take a look at the event, I'd recommend clicking here.

The most important thing Microsoft addressed was the issue of the next Xbox being rumored to be always online.

That is false!

The system doesn't have to be connected to the internet for people to play games, but the option to always have the Xbox One always connected still exists.

The other big thing is that each system comes bundled with a Kinect 2.0 inside the box.  Some of the new features look pretty cool. For instance, the Kinect 2.0 can recognize depth and rotation so making a grabbing motion with your hands is recognizable and shown as a feature for returning to the home screen.

Lag was a big issue addressed, and from the stage demo, switching between live TV input, internet, games and/or movies is as simple as just telling the Xbox to do so. It all looked seamless. Plus there is a picture-in-picture type feature so you can watch a movie and surf the web, though it looks like you need another device (smartphone or tablet) to do so.

Perhaps the biggest news was the announcement of a live action Halo TV series that is going to be directed by Steven Spielberg.

Yes, Steven Spielberg!

That man is amazing and should be able to turn the world of Halo into a compelling TV series.

Not much was shown in terms of actual games. There will be a new Madden, FIFA, UFC and NBA game all by EA Sports. They also teased the new Call of Duty: Ghosts by Infinity and a new Remedy (makers of Max Payne and Alan Wake) game called Quantum Break (though not much footage of the actual game is shown in the trailer). Gamers will have to wait until E3 for more game announcements, but Microsoft did promise a lot of exclusivity. Whether this is in terms of games, DLC or early releases has yet to be seen.

Pong

I was talking about tennis lately and it got me all pumped up to go out and play a few sets. The weather is fantastic, so once I get over this cold I'll definitely get back out there.

It's pretty crazy how far video games have come since they started with the Odyssey and Atari. Pong was basically the translation of a tennis (table or court) match onto the TV while not exerting much physical effort.

Now we Virtua Tennis and Mario Tennis and other iterations. I guess those games got me interested to eventually pick up a paddle and racquet. Sports are great and I've picked them up fairly quickly and have gotten quite good at each of the games.

I don't think I ever played Pong with the old Atari controllers, so I'm adding that to my video game bucket list.

Street Fighter: Shoryuken

Street Fighter is great. I heard this joke from a friend and felt that it needed some images with it.

Some good news this week is that the fifth installment in the Ace Attorney games will be coming stateside to the 3DS via Nintendo's virtual e-store. I still do not own a 3DS, which is starting to become a problem...I'll try to fix that soon.

The Fuse demo is out as well. I downloaded it on XBox. The Insomniac game seems fun enough. The draw for me is it's special weapons and co-op game play. My problem is that I don't have people to play it with and I feel I have enough shooters. The demo is fun though and I highly recommend giving it a go.

Big news for next week is the unveiling of Microsoft's new system. I'm keeping my trackers on that since it's definitely something I'll pick up (sorry Sony, I'm already invested in my gamertag).

Angry Birds

The mobile game that took the world by storm. There are so many spin-offs of this game now: Seasons, Rio, Friends, Space, Star Wars. This game even has board games now.

Sure, it's fun, but we're on Angry Birds overload.

We were given some insight into the world of the pigs with the Bad Piggies game. You'd think that the pigs would wise up and just start messing with the birds. Why not just disguise the eggs as pigs? Maybe that would just make angrier birds, but it would be worth a shot.

Mega Man: The Toddler Years

Yeah, so Mega Man as a baby. Dr. Light must have had some serious baby-proofing technology.

I'm crossing timelines with classic and the X series, but those upgrade machines had to be tested at some point.

May The Fourth Be With You

Happy Free Comic Book Day everybody! Lucky for you all my stuff is "free."

No comic today though since it's my off day and I don't have a comic book. Hopefully soon though. I've been working on some characters.

Cheers!

Iron Man

Iron Man 3 is out today (Friday). Being the Marvel fanboy I am, of course I went to the midnight screening. It was only fitting that today's comic be based on that invincible piece of metal.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and might go so far as to say it is the best of the three so far since it really stands on its own and depicts Tony Stark as a lot more vulnerable. Sure there are always those typical movie plot holes, but you don't realize it too much when you're watching.

There is a charming twist in the movie that I wasn't expecting. I'll just say that Ben Kingsley's character is my favorite in the movie.

Today's joke also pays homage to one of my favorite SNL skits with Will Ferrell, Christopher Walken and Blue Oyster Cult.